1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to supervising services and, more particularly, to methods for implementing a dynamic service-event management system, covering mostly supervise services of utility, telecommunication and financial service provider networks.
In the XXI. century all areas of common life are interwoven by services such as utility and financial services, including e.g. gas, water, sewer, electricity and telecommunication services. Meanwhile, demands of customers are increasing for flawless high-quality service. Another aim to fulfil is the growing liability for service providers because of increasing complexity of devices used for providing services and large number of users. Liability is growing because the number of incoming monitored events is extremely large and heterogeneous. Services may be affected by e.g. a broken pipe, a broken wire, actual gas calorific values, PH value of water, a solar flare, a foreign exchange price or just a sick customer service staff. Therefore continuous monitoring of service quality can only be possible with help of sophisticated mechanised systems.
2. Problem to be Solved
Basically, real-time monitoring of service status and quality of service provider networks. Detecting, indicating and documenting/logging probable failure causes or deteriorations in real-time. Intervention to restore or improve the quality of service functionality based on result of analysis. Furthermore, unified handling of different types of interweaving or parallel provider networks.
For example, consider a small village as a simplistic example for task to be solved. This has its own electric power plant and every consumer has smart metering means. Using information of this two event source types and hundreds of event sources we got continuous and accurate reports of status and quality of every service.
However, the village's water supply pumps can also work with electricity. Therefore the electrical system failure can also affect water supply.
In addition, the gas pressure regulators use electric current too. Thus, errors occurring in the electrical service can affect the supply of gas.
But of course, the settlement has telecommunication infrastructure. Said electrical system failure can also affect telecommunication services.
And finally, the small village has a bank office. If any power failure occurred, the bank office will get closed and this can deteriorate the quality of financial service.
Again emphasised, this is a very simple example. To understand the real task, the supervised area should be extended to a small town, to a big city, to a county, to a country or to a continent. In such a case, we are talking about not just one but many different types of power plant which are linked through a complicated network of pipes and lines and connected through to consumers. Interweaving networks (such as water, gas) are inhomogeneous and complicated themselves, and contains backup paths. Moreover, in practice, many other problems characterise and affect these networks.
Should the task be expressed using a mathematical formula then its complexity is twice of the sum of the complexity of covered service provider networks, and the knowledge necessary to construct at least as much as the amount of knowledge used to build service networks.
3. State of the Art
To understand state of art it is important to emphasize the difference between a standard event correlation and root failure cause analyser systems, and a service oriented event correlation and root failure cause analyser systems. For a standard system any method can provide adequate result. Accordingly, many standard solutions are known, such as the solutions disclosed e.g. in U.S. Pat. No. 5,761,502, U.S. Pat. No. 7,730,494, US 2010325493, US 2006/0095815, US 2008/0181099, US 2008/0298229, US 2010/0050023, US 2010/0157812, US 2010/0287361, US 2010/0223628, U.S. Pat. No. 7,401,264, US 2008/0046266. In contrary, service oriented systems and methods are useful in practice only if common denominator of different technologies are defined and handled, and have proper features to handle events in a shared architecture. The common denominator is a precondition for unified handling of dissimilar bearer technologies. The shared architecture needed for efficient handling of numerous bearer technologies and events.
Solutions closest to the methods according to several aspects of the invention are published by the organisation ITU-T for telecommunication sector as recommendations. However this recommendations do not provide realizable solution for practice, just provide the standardization. For example, US 2002/0022952 disclose attempts to upgrade the subject recommendations.
Recommendation X.200 defines interwork between various entities, defines the conception of services and service access points. Recommendation X.701 defines a general management conception. Recommendation X.710 defines a kind of common event format, recommendation Q812 defines its content, and the recommendation X.711 defines its processing method. Recommendation X.720 define common event types, recommendation X.721 defines its content. Recommendation X.722 defines conception of managed objects representing event sources; recommendation X.723 defines their recommended attributes. Recommendation X.725 defines relations between objects. Recommendation X.730 defines usage of a managed object for management systems. Recommendation X.731 defines possible states of the object. Recommendation X.732 defines usage of object relations for management systems. Recommendation X.733 defines a method of alert generation and its content. Recommendation X.734 defines a method of forwarding events to partner systems. Recommendation X.735 and X.754 define event logging functions. Recommendation X.744 defines software as managed object. Recommendation X.790 defines trouble ticket handling; recommendation X.791 defines its storage and query.
Recommendation M.3060 transforms these recommendations to service-oriented architecture (SOA) for the next generation networks (NGN). Recommendation M.3010 defines interfaces between. Recommendation Y.2011 defines integrity of multi-layered networks; the recommendation G.7718 defines integrity of complementary networks. Recommendation M.3050 define co-operation with partner networks.
Service event correlation and service management is also employed in the field of IT and telecommunication as discussed for example in ANDREAS HANEMANN et al.: “Assured Service Quality by Improved Fault Management, Service-Oriented Event Correlation”, ACM, 2 PENN PLAZA, SUITE 701-NEW YORK, USA, 19 Nov. 2004, XP040012727; as well as in VITALIAN A CANIU et al.: “Declarative Specification of Service Management Attributes”, INTEGRATED NETWORK MANAGEMENT, 2007. IM '07. 10th IFIP/IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON, IEEE, PI, 1 May 2007, pages 429-438, XP031182717, ISBN: 978-1-4244-0798-9. Even these publications do not provide adequate description of complex heterogeneous systems.
In summary, relating known systems and inventions are basically divided into four groups. First and oldest group is built by network management systems focused to root failure cause analysis. The second group contains enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) focused to static event handling. The third group contains the completely abstract unaccomplishable publications. The fourth group contains a system without common structure composed by many different products. Common characteristic of said groups does not offer a comprehensive and workable solution on an industrial scale.
In view of the above, there is a need for methods for providing universal and common solutions. In other words, just at the phase of a customer specific implementation is required to be aware of structures and particular processing methods of incoming and outgoing events.